Award- winning investigative Journalist and Author Having been awarded more than 12 world

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Imad Mughniyeh and Iraq Jihadists in exchange

for al-Hariri!
The full story of the secret deal concluded by Damascus and Washington in the spring of
2007, and the role of the Mossad man Nathan Jacobson, Netanyahu’s envoy to Bashar Al-
Assad.

Thus Hezbollah executed al-Assad's advisor, Brigadier Suleiman, as a «scapegoat» for the
al-Assad regime.

By: Nizar Nayouf (*)

(15.09.2020)

After 15 years' waiting, and expenditures exceeding a billion dollars, half of which have been
paid from Lebanese taxpayers’ pockets, the Chamber of First Instance at the UN International
Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) issued its decision on the 15th of last August with regard
to the assassination of the former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri on 14 Feb 2005 by a bombed
Mitsubishi truck that had been stolen from Japan and transported to northern Lebanon via the
United Arab Emirates. The 2682-page ruling convicted one person (Salim Ayyash) of
masterminding the assassination, who is a Lebanese civil defence employee allegedly
belonging to Hezbollah. The verdict acquitted the other three defendants, allegedly affiliated
with Hezbollah too, as well as Syrian and Lebanese Generals, especially the 4 Lebanese
security services’ former heads, who had been arbitrarily arrested in solitary cells for a period
of four years and defamed throughout 15 years by the domestic and international media. In
addition, the ruling asked the UN and the Lebanese government to compensate and apologize
to them.

The only evidences on which the tribunal relied are the so-called «circumstantial evidence»;
e.g. the existence of the convicted «Ayyash» at the scene of the crime when it was committed,
and his making a number of mobile-phone calls before, during and after the explosion,
although the ruling didn’t say any word on the nature of the calls, given the fact that the
Prosecutor did not present to the tribunal any audio or text records of those calls to display and
confirm their contents. Thus – as we implicitly understand from the ruling - «Salim Ayyash»
was a superman with supernatural capabilities: He stole the truck from Japan and transferred it
to northern Lebanon via UAE all by his own, and he booby-trapped it with more than two tons
of RDX explosives also all by his own, and he is the only one who has recruited the truck
suicide bomber (who is still unknown as if he was a genie who came from another galaxy!!),
 2

and - last but not least -he was the one who jammed the Hariri convoy’s electronic protection
system designed by one of the most famous Western companies! He alone did all these
logistical preparations despite the fact that the tribunal's documents themselves (Page 1075,
item 3294),which relied even on Saudi General Security records - acknowledge that he was
performing Hajj rituals in Saudi Arabia during the days leading up to the assassination! Rudely,
the verdict wants us to believe all of that, and believe also that a man who was making all these
transnational preparations to carry out the largest explosion in the history of the Middle East
had plenty of time and tranquillity to perform the rite of Hajj in Saudi Arabia together with his
wife a few days before his operation! Even so, the verdict, which describes the defendants in
all its pages as «supporters of [not affiliated with] Hezbollah», contains what is more striking,
particularly its assertion that the tribunal’s Prosecutor «did not provide any evidence indicating
that a member of Hezbollah or one of its leaders, particularly its secretary-general Sayyid
Hassan Nasrallah, had any motive to kill Mr. al-Hariri (...) and there is no evidence that
Hezbollah has instructed to provide Mr. Ayyash with logistical support for the assassination»
(pages 233, 240, items 765, 787).

In addition, it’s remarkable that the verdict , which repeated the reference to the «failure of
Prosecutor Norman Farrell» more than 173 times, and described the communications expert on
whom the Prosecutor's office has relied as an «expert without experience» (Page 99, items 340,
341), contained not only dozens of sceptical vocabularies like «maybe, perhaps, likely,
probably, possibly, supposedly...», but also at least 18 pages full of harsh criticism of the grave
violations committed by the UN International Independent Investigation Commission
(UNIIIC), the STL’s predecessor, during the investigation stages (2005-2009), especially with
regard to the arbitrary detention of the four Generals for a period of four years in solitary cells
and defaming them and their families, and the recruitment of dozens of paid false witnesses, of
whom the STL agreed to disclose only nine, while it withheld the rest on the pretext of «not
endangering their lives». Nevertheless, the funny thing is that the verdict did not hesitate (in
page 1877, item 5714) to reveal that the UNIIIC has relied on Israeli «woman expert» Rita
Katz (an Israeli Military Intelligence reserve officer), which is not legally-permissible because
her country is in a state of war with Lebanon and the defendant (Hezbollah).

Anyhow, three days after the decision, on August 21, the STL’s president, Judge David Rae,
issued a new procedural decision asking the UN Secretary-General and the Lebanese
government to apologize to the four Generals and compensate them, and describing what the
UNIIIC did in this context as «shameful and outrageous», and «violating local and
international laws». Most of the lawyers who accompanied the work of the STL for many years
have described the case as one of the biggest scandals in the history of international courts and
tribunals during the last half century. One of the French lawyers, Antoine Korkmaz, went even
further when he has asserted that «Ayyash» himself is innocent, and the STL convicted him
only to be a «scapegoat» for the failure of the prosecutor and to grant the latter a «consolation
prize» that could be a fig leaf covering the case’s genitalia in order not to uglify the face of
history’s justice!

But the most strange paradox in the story is that the UN, which has obligated Lebanon and
all its other members to cooperate with the UNIIIC by force of Chapter VII of its charter, itself
 3

has refrained from cooperating when it refused to allow the judges of the First Instance
Chamber to hear the testimony of the UN special envoy on the implementation of UNSC
Resolution 1559 Terje Roed-Larsen! However, the paradox does not end here, as the three
countries that stood in 2005 behind the formation of the UNIIIC by the Security Council (the
US, France, Britain), in addition to Israel, all have refused to cooperate with it or provide its
Canadian chairman Daniel Bellemare with the data they collected on Lebanon on the day of the
explosion. It’s known that these four countries, as well as other ones, routinely surveil the
Eastern Mediterranean region and get real-time satellite images and recordings of
communications like that being collected all the time by the Cyprus-based British base of
Akrotiri, and Israeli warplanes and drones that don’t not leave Lebanon’s sky neither in the
day nor at night. Judge Daniel Bellemare, the third chief of the UNIIIC and the first prosecutor
of its successor, STL, travelled to Washington in March 2010 and met with several of its senior
officials, including state secretary Condoleezza Rice, President Georg W. Bush’s advisor for
national security, Stephen Hadley, and CIA officers with the aim of getting their cooperation
and assistance, but he returned empty-handed, as we knew from The Canadian CBS TV
Channel’s investigation on 21.11.2010

I personally cooperated with the UNIIIC and its successor STL during the period 2006-
2010 with regard to three files related to the assassination of al-Hariri and journalists Gebran
Tueni and Samir Kassir (who were friends of mine). This has enabled me to reach many of the
secrets and data of both the two bodies, not to mention the regional and international
«conspiracies» and «deals» that have been made behind the case’s scenes and on its sidelines.
The investigation that I have conducted into the recruitment of false witnesses by the UNIIIC’s
first chairman, German judge Detlev Mehlis and his assistant Gerhard Lehmann, in collusion
with the French external intelligence, the Saudi intelligence and other sides, caused Mehlis to
be dismissed by the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Legal Affairs. For well-known legal
reasons, I had to keep silent throughout 15 years. Now, after the verdict, I am no longer
obligated to do so. The following lines are a summary of my experience with each of the two
bodies and the documents I have collected over 15 years, which would be revealed for the first
time.

***
The story began on Wednesday, June 13, 2007, when the Belgian judge Serge Brammertz,
the chairman of the UNIIIC, suddenly and without any prior notice, summoned a small
handful of his trusted assistants and interpreters to an hotel room near the headquarters of the
UNIIIC in the Monte Verde district, east of Beirut, which was being used as a «private
operation room» particularly for holding meetings with anonymous witnesses and «information
peddlers», and kindly asked them to turn off their mobile phones and put them on a table in the
room’s corner before he detonated his bomb:

«It seems that the USA has issued orders that the orientation of the
investigation into the assassination of Mr. Al-Hariri must be diverted from
Damascus to Beirut, so that Hezbollah should be who accused of committing the
crime instead of the Syrian regime. According to my very fresh information, the
 4

USA concluded a deal with the Syrian government on the sidelines of the Sharm
al-Sheikh conference for Iraq, held last May. In accordance with the deal the
Syrian government would will help in reaching the head of Imad Mughniyeh, the
Hezbollah military commander, and stop the flow of terrorists into Iraq and arrest
them ... in exchange for omitting the Syrian government and its intelligence
officers, whether in their legal or personal capacity, from the list of those
suspicious and accused of being involved in the crime. As this matter is
considered a shameless and villainous interference in the impartial and
unprejudiced work of the UNIIIC, and actually a mere issuance of convictional
sentences before the end of the investigation, I decided to resign. Therefore, any
one of you wants to continue serving this farce is free, and whoever wants to
safeguard his professional honour can resign as I will do tomorrow morning».

What Brammertz revealed at that closed meeting can’t be surprising to any prudent observer.
Some years later, senior Western officials, such as the former French Foreign Minister, Roland
Dumas, and the US eminent general Wesley Clark, will admit, whether directly or indirectly,
that the decision to accuse Hezbollah [instead of the Syrian regime] was one of the USA-
managed acts of revenge against this armed Shiite party because its resounding success to
frustrate the New Middle East project which Condoleezza Rice called for and assigned Israel to
implement through the 33-day war of 2006, during which Hezbollah was able to defeat four
Israeli armoured divisions, and digest the effectiveness of the largest quantity of massively-
destructive missiles and bombs to have been used in one war since World War II. «It was not
acceptable for us, Western countries sponsoring Israel, that a small militia [Hezbollah] was
able to withstand the most powerful army in the Middle East throughout 33 days - the army
that managed to occupy large parts of Egypt, Jordan and Syria within six hours [during the
June 1967 war]», said Dumas. Fundamentalist Islam, which has become a permanent strategic
reserve for who have created it since the creation of the «Muslim Brotherhood» by MI6 in
1920s, and the al-Qaeda fathers by the CIA in 1979, as Brzezinski and Mrs. Clinton admitted,
was also another means to punish and take revenge on Hezbollah. Fundamentalist Islam,
especially its Saudi-Wahhabi version «got started through funding by our friends and allies
(...).If you want somebody who will fight to the death against Hezbollah (...) you go after
zealots and you go after religious fundamentalists. That's who fights Hezbollah», would say
General Clark to CNN in 2015.

Anyhow, the next day, June 14, 2007, Mr Brammertz actually resigned without giving any
reason, even if the UN Secretary-General asked him to run UNIIIC affairs until an alternative
judge was found. The resignation was a frustrating and tragic surprise for everyone having
been awaiting a transparent and impartial international investigation led by a judge who has
been known for his morals and nobility before being known for his professionalism. But he did
not submit his resignation before issuing a decision (would not be implemented until two years
later) to recommend the release of the four Lebanese generals who had been arrested two years
earlier by order of German judge Detlev Mehlis, the first head of the UNIIIC, and his deputy
and countryman intelligence officer Gerhard Lehmann, by virtue of paid testimonies given by
more than 13 false witnesses, one of whom was Abdul Basit Bani Odeh, a Sweden-based
 5

Palestinian agent of the Mossad. These false witnesses, as it has become known and
documented since 2006 at least, have been «purchased» by Mehlis and Lehman with Saudi
Arabia and Saad al-Hariri’s money after they have been recruited by two of the leaders of the
«US-Saudi lobby» in Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt and Marwan Hamadeh, in addition to Colonel
Wissam al-Hassan, head of the team responsible for the security of Mr Hariri’s convoy.

The paradox is that the latter was absent on the day of the Beirut big bombing, which he had
done for the first time throughout his security service, and involved in the assassination plot on
behalf of a foreign intelligence service. This information is based on an interview with Swedish
detective Bo Åström, the UNIIIC’s senior international investigator, which was broadcasted by
Lebanese private TV Al-Jadeed on 10 Dec.2013. «No one but him has known the convoy’s
track. That morning he gave his directions to the person who deputized for him, and set the
secret route that the convoy must take, and then he disappeared until the evening. He claimed
that his absence was due to that he had exams at the Lebanese University, and heard the
explosion from the media. But he has completely failed to prove to us anything of his humbug
claims», said Åström. This testimony’s content was revealed for the first time 3 years earlier
(21.11.2010) in the Canadian CBC TV’s investigation that published a UNIIIC document
including the records of the investigation with Colonel al-Hassan. The paradox is that the latter
would disappear from existence forever two years later, on 19 Oct.2012, by a car bomb as soon
as he left a secret flat in East Beirut’s district of Achrafieh where he was meeting with well-
known Lebanese female-journalist (M.M.) who has been working with the French external
intelligence (DGSE) and is being funded by the Saudis and other Gulf governments, according
to Saudi and Qatari official documents I was able to obtain some years ago.

On June 12, 2007, one day before the «hotel meeting», Brammertz submitted his developed
periodical eighth report to the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, in which he re-confirmed
the content of his seventh report as regards the suicide bomber who carried out the
assassination with a Mitsubishi truck, stolen from Japan, explaining that «he is between 20 and
25 years old, and probably not Lebanese. He grew up in an urban milieu [as proved by the
laboratory analysis] of 32 shreds of his corpse remains found at the site of the explosion,
including part of one of his teeth [...so much so that] the UNIIIC can now add that this person
has lived in a highly polluted environment up to the age of 12 years and in a less polluted
environment during his last ten years». The report, which revealed for the first time that «the
perpetrator of the assassination had made a previous testing attempt to carry out the crime» and
commended «the Syrian officials’ satisfactory cooperation with the investigators», also
received the applause and praise of Washington's representative to the United Nations, John
Bolton, who stressed that «Brammertz is fast approaching the presentation of evidence to the
court that will handle the trial of the accused». One of the oddities of the UNIIIC vestibules is
that the 32 shreds of the suicide-bomber’s body, as well as surveillance cameras recordings in
the area of the explosion would later «disappear» from its drawers in mysterious
circumstances!

On the same day the «hotel meeting» was held, June 13th, Lebanese MP Walid Eido,
belonging to al-Hariri's party, was assassinated by «Fatah al-Islam» (a branch of Al-Qaeda in
 6

Lebanon), which launched a bloody campaign against the Lebanese army three weeks earlier.
This led to the outbreak of a 3-months fierce battle in the «Nahr al-Bared camp of Palestinian
refugees» adjacent to Tripoli, and resulted in the destruction of the miserable camp with barrel
bombs provided to the Lebanese army's helicopters by the Syrian army, as well as the
displacement of its 30,000 refugees who are still practically «homeless» (it seems this was a
mere Prova by Al-Assad for what he would do in Syria's slums and informal settlements four
years later for the benefit of his own mafia of real estate development companies). Later on, it
will become evident that the the beginning of the war launched by the Wahhabi terrorist group
is marked by the fact that its leader, Shaker al-‘Absi, discovered that the Bank of the
Mediterranean’s branch in the town of Amioun near Tripoli, which is owned by the Hariri
family, had stopped paying monthly salaries to the group’s militants at the request of the
United States (cf. Seymour Hersch: The Redirection, The New Yorker, March 5, 2007).

The ironic paradox is that Shaker al-‘Absi secretly fled to Syria after his defeat in the camp
battle, and, according to a Syrian secret official document that I obtained in year 2010, he was
on that date still alive and arrested in Branch 235 (Branch of Palestine) belonging to the Syrian
Military Intelligence Department (SMID).

At that time, I was still a political refugee in France, and it had been nearly two years since I
have started my cooperation with the UNIIIC as regards three files relating to the assassination
of two of my Lebanese friends, journalists Samir Kassir and Gibran Tueni, as well as the case
of al-Hariri. This cooperation began in the spring of 2005 as a result of a secret investigation
that I conducted on a personal initiative achieved within a few weeks and devoted to the issue
of the recruitment of false witnesses, particularly swindler Zuhair Al-Siddiq, by Lehmann and
Mehlis in coordination with the French External Intelligence (DGSE) that had made
extraordinary efforts to recruit me as a «false witness» in the case of the al-Hariri assassination!
When I was called to one of its headquarters' floors on 141 Boulevard Mortier, I was greeted
by an officer who introduced himself as «Colonel Hébrard», which is certainly a pseudonym.
«You have always been dreaming of overthrowing the Syrian regime. . Now you can realize
your dream. All you have to do is to confirm that Zuhair Al-Siddiq is really a Syrian
intelligence officer, and that he is one of the people who had tortured you during your
detention», said the Colonel while he was chewing something in his mouth. He was exactly
like the Assad officers whose solitary cells had been snapping my flesh throughout ten years
(1991-2001), excepting that he spoke French and his voice was coming from the depth of the
nearby Père-Lachaise Cemetery that I felt was about to swallow me, not from the depth of a
mass graves in the Syrian desert, which I dug up one day in 1989 to document the 1981
Palmyra prison massacre!

Al-Siddiq, who was nothing but an almost-illiterate international imposter and could barely
write his name correctly, has been recruited by the Lebanese Minister of Communications,
Marwan Hamadeh, born to an Israeli-French mother, and presented by him to the DGSE that in
turn «donated» him to Mehlis and Lehmann who made him the «king's evidence» in the al-
Hariri case throughout about two years! As a result, my investigation, which has reached Mr.
Larry Johnson, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, caused the dismissal of
 7

Mehlis in early 2006, and converted Al-Siddiq from a «king's evidence» to a criminal wanted
on the charge of misleading justice, but the DGSE and its Saudi partners have hidden him and
prevented the hand of justice from reaching him! Indeed, had it not been for the archive and
personal papers of Markus Wolf, the founder and director of former East German’s external
intelligence (HVA), it would have been difficult to enter the vestibules of judge Mehlis and
figuring out his «professionally-disgraceful history». Wolf, who put his personal archive at my
disposal as of 2002 to write his «Arab memoirs», had a file on Mehlis’s «corruption, non-
impartiality, professionalism in forgery and manipulation of criminal evidence, and his close
relationships with the CIA, the DGSE and the Mossad (...) which we have discovered since the
mid-1980s via our moles at the then Western Germany’s BND (...) but particularly after he was
assigned to investigate the blasts of la belle discotheque [ in West Berlin] and a German-Arab
social centre in 1986...». However, on the other hand, my investigation caused my «escape»
from Paris to London after my life has become seriously threatened by the French who were
not satisfied with kidnapping me for 28 hours while I was participating in the annual
conference of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and receiving its Golden Pen prize
in the Belgian town of Bruges, but also they have used their entirely intelligence and
diplomatic weight in order to accuse the Syrian regime of assassinating al-Hariri just because
Bashar al-Assad and his regime’s mafias have refused to grant the Total S.E. group the
privilege to explore for gas in Syria!

After the «deposition» of Mehlis in late 2005, which was staged to be «resignation» when he
suddenly left Beirut once and for all to France (not to Germany!?) as if he was escaping. My
cooperation with the UNIIIC allowed me to communicate with a number of direct assistants
closely related to his successor Serge Brammertz, including those who attended the
aforementioned «hotel meeting», and thus I was able to see what was going on in the UNIIIC’s
vestibules, which, in the era of Mehlis and Lehmann and those who succeeded Brammertz, had
been turned into one of the largest dens of «political prostitution» in the contemporary history
of the Middle East!

According to a message that I received from a UNIIIC former colleague’s professional email
address, who participated in the «Hotel meeting» the same day, Mr Brammertz did not mention
any details related to the «Sharm al-Sheikh US-Syrian deal». But a number of official
documents that I would obtain later, including e-mails sent by Major General Amin Sharabah,
the then chief of Branch 235 and the former military attaché to the Syrian embassy in Paris, to
one of his French diplomatic friends, a special meeting was held on the sidelines of the 3 May
«Sharm el-Sheikh conference», which included US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
her assistant for Iraqi affairs, David Satterfield, on the American side, while the Syrian side
included foreign minister Walid al-Muallem and a high-ranking Syrian officer supposed to be
brigadier Muhammad Suleiman, head of one of Bashar Al-Assad's special desks. It is known
that the Syrian presidential palace has been accustomed to foist an intelligence officer into its
diplomatic delegations even when they go to Roma in order to discuss an agricultural issue
with FAO, or to Paris to discuss an educational one with UNESCO!
 8

Anyhow, the US-Syrian conclave of Sharm al-Sheikh, which lasted more than an hour, was
devoted to discussing the issue of the influx of Islamic terrorists into Iraq from and through the
Syrian territories with the help of the «Republican Guard» supervised by Al-Assad's brother
Colonel Maher, and to the international investigation into the al-Hariri case. When the Syrian
delegation returned to Damascus, it brought with it a USA offer to include an American pledge
that Washington would not undertake any actions that could destabilize the Syrian regime, and
will work to clear Damascus of involvement in the assassination of al-Hariri, and to revive the
secret peace negotiations with Israel that had been continuing through what was known as «
The Swiss-Turkish track » until early July 2006 when they stopped due to the 33-day war
launched by Israel against Lebanon. In return, the US side requested Damascus to stop the flow
of terrorists into Iraq and arrest them, in addition to helping reach Imad Mughniyeh, the
military commander of Hezbollah, who had been wanted by the US since the early 1980s in
connection with the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in April 1983, which killed about
seventy American citizens including a large number of diplomats and CIA officers, and the
bombing of the US Marine headquarters at Beirut Airport six months later, which resulted in
the killing of about 250 US Marines and officers.

Of course, the Syrian delegation to «Sharm el-Sheikh» was not entitled to discuss such as
offer, let alone approving it. Therefore, Walid al-Muallem suggested transmitting it to
President Bashar al-Assad, with Damascus notifying the American side of the Syrian
government’s final opinion as soon as possible, which - it seems- happened at the end of May,
given that Satterfield (or/and Lieutenant General Dell L. Dailey) paid a secret visit to
Damascus in early June, according to one of General Sharabah's letters to the French diplomat,
which dated 10 June. However, the most prominent indication to the results of this visit
appeared not only through the «hotel meeting» and the resignation of Judge Brammertz the
next day, June 14, but also - which is the clearest indication - through a secret Syrian document
issued on Thursday, June 21, 2007 by an extraordinary meeting of the National Security
Bureau (NSB), the supreme political leadership of all intelligence services in Syria. The
document is a circular issued to both the defence and interior ministries and their security
services requiring them to work to stop the infiltration of and arrest Syrian and foreign Islamic
terrorists going to Iraq, as well as arresting those returning to Syria from there. Based on this
decision, Brigadier General Sharabah himself (originally is a commando officer and was to
date supervising the infiltration of Islamists into Iraq after they undergo training in the
Republican Guard’s «Jdeidet Shibani Camp» adjacent to Damascus) will assigned to lead the
operation to stop the infiltration of terrorists and establish a hundreds-of- kilometres dirt barrier
along the Iraqi-Syrian borders, especially in desert areas that are difficult to be monitored. The
circular also included «directives to the Air Forces and Air Defence to turn a blind eye to the
air force belonging to the US occupation forces in Iraq during its pursuit of terrorists up to a
depth of 20 km inside Syrian territory»!

Within a few months of the issuance of the aforementioned circular, approximately three
thousand Syrian and foreign-nationalities al-Qaeda and other Salafi and Wahhabi militants,
became arrested in Syria. These are the ones who will be released by the Syrian regime in the
spring of 2011 in accordance with the «extremely confidential» order issued on 19 March
 9

2011by the NSB in order to militarize the Syrian popular uprising and turn it into an «armed
Wahhabi-Islamic revolution»!

It remains to be noted in this context that the Saudi embassy in Paris may have been the first
to smell the «Sharm el-Sheikh deal». According to an «encrypted telegram» sent on 20/5/1428
AH [= June 6, 2007]from the Saudi ambassador in Paris, Dr. Muhammad bin Ismail Al Al-
Sheikh, to the then Saudi foreign minister, Saud Al-Faisal, the embassy has obtained
information that « judge Brammertz will soon resign in protest against an American-Syrian
deal concluded during the Sharm al-Sheikh conference, which provides for the acquittal of the
Syrian regime of the charge of involvement in the assassination of Mr. Rafik al-Hariri, and
accusing Hezbollah of committing the crime». It is noteworthy that the embassy's information
depended on a woman-lawyer (A.A.C.), who was working as an assistant to Judge Brammertz,
and on French intelligence sources! I prefer not to mention the lawyer’s explicit name here,
given the fact that I am now drafting a documented investigation about the UNIIIC’s internal
work and selling its investigations’ secrets for $ millions to domestic and world media, as well
as intelligence agencies, by Lebanese and foreign consultants, interpreters and investigators,
some of whom have become brilliant names in the field of defending human rights and UN
Goodwill Ambassadors! This woman-lawyer, for instance, who was a «liaison officer»
between me and judge Brammertz, was the one who has stood behind the disappearance of all
the investigations and documents that I have sent to him by her, especially those related to the
assassination of journalists Tueni and Kassir, and she also stood behind leaking them to the
Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt. The latter, because of that, held a press conference in Beirut
in 2007 and - during one of his well-known bouts of delirium - accused me of «being working
for the benefit of the Syrian intelligence», which was a reason of making him a laughing stock
and a subject of ridicule in domestic and pan-Arab media having been aware that I had spent
ten years in the Syrian regime’s solitary cells and become partly-paralyzed forever due to
torture, not to mention losing my infant daughter who was kidnapped by SMID as a hostage in
order to enforce me to surrender myself!

Did Israel «intercept» the US-Syrian communications and play for its own account?

Meanwhile, or rather a few weeks after the secret visit of Satterfield (or /and General Dell L.
Dailey) to Damascus, two noteworthy «suspicious» events happened. The first one was in late
June when Brigadier Muhammad Suleiman suddenly paid a secret visit to Paris using a
diplomatic passport, according to an e-mail message I received from a woman-friend who was
working at the French embassy in Damascus. This enabled me to have made sure in person that
he held a series of meetings at the George V Hotel near the Champs-Elysées Avenue, and in
the newly-dissenting Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam’s villa in the Parisian
Avenue Foch, with people strongly-believed they were Israeli Mossad agents, not only because
one of Khaddam’s hacked emails indicated that, or the hotel guest records, which I was able to
check, indicated simultaneous arrival of Israeli citizens to the same hotel, but also because
Brigadier Suleiman himself was one of the Syrian official figures (and nonofficial ones like Al-
Assad's father-in-law Dr. Fawaz al-Akhras and his colleague Dr. Gaith Armanazi) who have
been employed as «Back Channels» to conduct secret contacts with the Israelis in various
times. Dr. Al-Akhras, for example and according to Syrian official documents I have had,
 10

conveyed a «reassuring message» from al-Assad to Ehud Olmert's government during the
2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, in which the first pledged that he would prevent Hezbollah's leader
Hassan Nasrallah from targeting the Gush Dan area (Tel Aviv and its environs) with missiles.
It was because the Israeli government threatened that it will destroy the infrastructure and
«state facilities involved in supporting terrorism» in Damascus if Nasrallah fulfils his threat to
bombard Tel Aviv with missiles. This is not to mention that Suleiman himself, and his
colleague Brigadier Basheer Karah Falah, accompanied the President’s brother Colonel Maher
al-Assad during his official secret meeting with the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Eitan Ben Zur, in Amman in March 2003, according to what the Israeli Maariv
newspaper revealed at the time, which caused an overt tension between PM Ariel Sharon and
his foreign ministry. However, it is not yet known, at least to me, whether Suleiman’s Parisian
meetings were commissioned by Al-Assad or he was working on his own account, at least on
some espionage tasks, which is possible, given the chain of sequential series of events that
would happen later. What should be noted in this context is that the «Al-Kibar site» near the
city of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, which was alleged to have been a nuclear reactor under
construction, would be destroyed by the Israeli air force on September 6 (two months after
Brigadier Suleiman's meetings at the Parisian George V Hotel!!). It’s known that one of the
special tasks that Suleiman had been undertaking, in addition to his task as head of Bashar al-
Assad’s special military office, was to supervise the programs of military industries, especially
the Defence Ministry’s «Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre», which the «Al-Kibar
site» was one of its facilities.

Anyhow, the second event was the arrival of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu's close friend,
famous Canadian-Israeli billionaire and Mossad man, Nathan Jacobson, on a surprise and
lightning secret visit to Damascus in early July 2007, where he met with al-Assad, as Jacobson
himself would reveal to Canadian CBC News in fall of 2012 and publish a photo bringing them
together. According to an e-mail by one of my official sources in Damascus (dated 1 Sept
2007), Brigadier Suleiman himself participated in the al-Assad- Jacobson meeting, which
Jacobson confirmed to me when I called him at his Toronto office 5 years ago via a Canadian
academic friend. It is widely known in the American and Israeli newspapers that Jacobson was
also a personal friend of the head of the Mossad at the time, Meir Dagan, and one of his
striking arms in pursuing and tracking the cadres of Hezbollah and Hamas and the financial
activities of these two factions around the world.

About 7 months later (February 12, 2008, 10.45 PM), Imad Mughniyeh, the legendary
military commander of Hezbollah, who was fascinated by Trotsky in his adolescence and
before his affiliation to The Palestinian National Liberation Movement (FATAH) led by
Yasser Arafat, and later to the Shiite Harakat al-Mahrumin («Movement of the Deprived») led
by Imam Musa al-Sadr, would be assassinated in the Damascene suburb of «Kafr Sousah», the
Syrian intelligence services’ own main den, immediately after he suddenly left a meeting that
was being held in flat No.152 of Block 146 known as Al-Hamad Building, in which a number
of Hezbollah and Iranian military and security cadres were also participating. The Syrian and
Hezbollah secret investigations, which are still unspoken, will later discover that his sudden
leaving was due to his receiving a text message from an «unknown source», and his
 11

instantaneous death was caused by the blast of the spare wheel of a Mitsubishi Pajero that was
brought and parked next to his own car while he was participating in the meeting. As well, it
would be turned out that the blast was set up through a remote control device operated by
people in a flat located on the 6th floor of a building facing the scene, and the wheel was
charged with some KGs of specific explosives and steely balls, whose blast partially destroyed
Mughniyeh’s car when he was about to open its door and two other cars in the parking, and
shattered the windows of a number of neighbouring buildings, while the steely balls penetrated
even the iron electric pole adjacent to the car, which is shown in special photos I have obtained.
On this occasion, it must be said that nine-tenths of the 30 Jan 2015 Washington Post
investigation on the assassination, particularly its operational part and claim that «the
detonation of the car was carried out via satellites and with remote control from an operations
room in Tel Aviv», are nothing but juggling, superstitions and hallucinations by the CIA
personnel on whom the American newspaper depended as sources.

The first thing that was noticeable is that Hezbollah’s leader «ordered Mughniyeh's
companions participating in the meeting to withdraw his corpse from the scene and transfer it
to the Lebanese territory immediately, and not to allow the Syrian security services to reach it
whatever the cost may be», as told me a source at the newspaper «al-Ahed», Hezbollah's
official organ. «From the first moment, The Resistance [Hezbollah] had doubts that there was
some betrayal by one person or more within the Syrian intelligence agencies. That is why
Hezbollah did not announce the assassination and death of al-Hajj [Imad Mughniyeh] until
after his corpse arrived in Beirut and was underwent initial forensic medical examinations, and
why the Sayyed [Hassan Nasrallah] refused the participation of any Syrian official
representative in the funeral of al-Hajj», said the source in his affidavit to me.

The assassination was not only the biggest stab that Hezbollah has received since its
foundation in the early 1980s, but also an unprecedented security scandal to the Syrian regime
itself, especially since Mughniyeh had been pursued by the Israeli intelligence agencies and at
least 51 Western ones that all had failed to reach him throughout 25 years' pursuit. The brunt of
the calamity to the Iranians is what prompted not only a number of their senior intelligence and
Revolutionary Guards officers to travel to Damascus immediately, but also their foreign
minister Manouchehr Mottaki himself, who arrived in Damascus on 14 Feb to meet al-Assad
and his foreign minister Walid al-Muallem. In a joint press conference with his Iranian guest,
al-Muallem announced that «The assassination [of Mughniyeh] is an assassination of any peace
effort. We, as a state, will shortly prove with conclusive evidence who is involved in this crime
and who is behind it. The Syrian security services are continuing to investigate this terrorist
crime, and doing mighty efforts whose results will be announced soon». It was noted that the
Syrian regime, despite its close relationship with Iran at all levels, particularly security and
military ones, refused the participation of Iranian interrogators in the investigation, so much so
that the Syrian Military Prosecutor-General, Brigadier George Tahhan, expelled some of the
Iranian embassy’s staff who came to the scene, and prevented them from checking or
videographing the explosion's effects! Mughniyeh’s widow, Sa’da Badr al-Din, whose heart
was her guider as we say in our Arabic folk literature, didn’t hesitate to publicly accuse the
Syrian regime of treachery and treason. «The traitorous Syrians have facilitated the killing of
 12

my husband (....) Syria’s refusal of the participation of Iranian investigators is the

overwhelming evidence of the Damascus regime's involvement in killing Imad», said Mrs
Mughniyeh to some semi-official Iranian media outlets while she was receiving condolences in
Beirut. This statement was sufficient in itself to put the bereaved widow in a plane and send her
to Iran immediately, and then to be «disappeared» until now! No less important is that although
more than 12 years have passed by now since Al-Muallem’s statement, yet neither the Syrian
regime nor Hezbollah have ever said even one word about the results of the investigations
made by their security services! But the two «very confidential» reports submitted on 20 April
2008 and 27 July 2008 by the then head of the Syrian NSB, Major General Hisham Al-Ikhtiyar,
to the regime’s head, Bashar Al-Assad, of whose summaries I was able to obtain official copies
years ago, says it all as we will see bellow!

Six months later (August 1, 2007), the assassination of Mughniyeh would be followed by the
assassination of Brigadier Suleiman himself in his own chalet on the beach of Syria’s coastal
city of Tartous while President Al-Assad's plane was flying on its way to Tehran on an official
visit. According to three documents I would get later, one of which is his wife Reem’s written
testimony to me in August 2017, Brigadier Suleiman «newly coming back from a mission in
Europe, was decided to travel with Mr. President [al-Assad] to Tehran as the head of his
special military office, but the President suddenly asked him to go on vacation to Tartous
during his absence in Iran. Late in the evening on the day we arrived in Tartous, he was
assassinated on our chalet’s terrace by masked men who came from the sea being only a few
tens of meters from the terrace (...). The killers used silenced pistols and not sniper rifles as was
rumoured in the media...», said Reem Suleiman’s text message. Moreover, she stressed that her
husband was killed in «mysterious circumstances», and «the government itself has never said
to us [his family] that the Israelis are who assassinated him. I wish they [Israelis] were who did
that in order to give him the honour of martyrdom in facing them».

What was remarkable is that neither the assassination of Brigadier Suleiman nor his funeral,
which was very modest, were mentioned in the regime-run official media despite his high-
ranking position in the pyramid of the Syrian regime and al-Assad’s narrow circle. Moreover,
the intelligence services in Tartous refused to allow his family to print and publish obituary
leaflets! The only official comment on his assassination, which came four days late, was a very
brief statement by Bouthaina Shaaban, the political and media advisor to Bashar al-Assad, in
which she said, «He [Suleiman] is a Syrian Arab Army officer and was killed in an
assassination incident, and the investigation is still ongoing». She didn’t only avoid calling him
a «martyr», as usual practice in such cases, but also refused to accuse Israel of being behind his
assassination. Except for this orphan statement, the event would immediately be shelved,
forgotten and never be officially addressed, although many foreign and Arab media outlets
reported that he was assassinated by Israeli commando snipers who came by sea. This
narrative, which is very silly and completely false and aiming to impart supernatural traits to
the Mossad’s capabilities, would be recalled in 2018 by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in
chapter 34 (particularly pages 602-606) of his book «Rise and Kill First» citing Mossad
sources whose ignorance and fabrication have reached the point of naming Brigadier
Suleiman’s wife «Rahab» when she is «Reem»! This also applies for the bullshit of the US
 13

National Security Agency’s allegations mentioned in a document that Edward Snowden leaked
to «The Intercept» on June 2, 2015, which attributed the assassination of Suleiman to Israel.
This cannot be evidence, given that it is based on speculations and assumptions depending on
circumstantial «monitoring communications signals», not on solid information or evidences.
Nevertheless, what will be strikingly meaningful is that the Damascus-based US embassy’s
WikiLeaks cable «09DAMASCUS274_a», dated 9 April 2009, indicated that «The subsequent
investigation into Suleiman’s slaying reportedly uncovered USD 80 million cash in a basement
room of the General's home in the mountains between Damascus and the Lebanese border
[near the Qudsayya suburb, where many senior Republican Guard officers and the regime's
civil and military elite-members reside]»! It’s clear that the Damascus-based US embassy has
had its information from within the narrow milieu of the investigation, given that it’s
mentioned only in the report of the head of the National Security Bureau to Bashar al-Assad, as
we will see below.

The NSB chief to Al- Assad: Brigadier Suleiman sold Mughniyeh, the «Pantsir S-1»
missiles deal and the alleged «al-Kibar nuclear reactor» and other State secrets for tens of
millions of dollars

When Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem announced that «mighty efforts are being
done» by his regime’s security and judicial agencies regarding the assassination of Imad
Mughniyeh, which would be repeated a few months later by Presidential Advisor Bouthaina
Shaaban with respect to the assassination of Brigadier Suleiman, he was honest in his
announcement. However, the results of these investigations, which actually were conducted
and reached their conclusions since April 2008, are another thing completely different.

According to the 3-page «initial report» submitted on 20 April 2008 by Major General Hisham
Al-Ikhtiyar , the head of the National Security Bureau (NSB), to his boss Bashar Al-Assad,
Suleiman was suspected of being involved in the assassination of Mughniyeh since the
beginning of the investigations, given that the communication towers’ data examined by the
Military Prosecutor-General, Brigadier George Tahhan, and other security services that were
cooperating with his technical team, had proven that there were communications throughout
that day between a phone number owned by Suleiman and another unknown number that was
moving in the scene of the operation all that day. This number, owned by Suleiman, was finally
switched off and put out of use some minutes after the assassination. Also, the investigators
discovered that both the apartment located in the Damascene suburb of «Kafr Sousah», in
which the assassination team ambushed that day, and a villa in the Sabboura suburb «al-Assad
villages», which was used by the team to booby-trap the fatal wheel, were «provided by
Suleiman». Given that the latter was not an ordinary employee, but rather one of the members
of al-Assad's narrow circle, and a right arm to him as regards performing many security and
military tasks inside and outside Syria, any «legalized» interrogation of him and access to his
equipments and communications, not to mention surveilling him, were impossible without Al-
Assad's approval. For these reasons, the NSB chief asked his boss, al-Assad, to «agree to put
Suleiman, his internal and external communications, and his computers under close
surveillance for a few months and to prevent him from taking his wife or/and children with him
 14

if he is assigned to missions outside Syria». It seems that Al-Assad agreed to the NSB demand
as we can clearly understand from the «final report» that Major General Al-Ikhtiyar submitted
to Al-Assad on July 27, 2008, 4 days before the assassination (in fact: execution)of Suleiman,
which was a summary of the decisive investigations conducted by the Military Intelligence, the
General Intelligence and the Military Prosecution. The 20th April’s report concluded that
«Brigadier General Engineer Muhammad Kamel Suleiman had probably been working in
exchange for money or for political motives related to national treason with a number of
foreign intelligence services, and very likely with the Israeli enemy’s ones as well, since at
least 2003, and possibly since he was studying at the Malinovsky Armour Academy in Moscow
during the 1990s». The report suggested that «it’s very likely the Israeli enemy had succeeded
in recruiting him with the help of the Jordanian intelligence service, when he accompanied
Colonel Maher Al-Assad to Amman in March 2003 to meet with the former Director General
of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eitan Ben Zur, or while he was on external tasks,
especially in Russia and France». The report alluded to «Jordanian precedents» in this context,
without specifying them. But it was - certainly - referring to the largest breach operation
carried out by the Mossad at the top of the Syrian regime’s hierarchy with the help of King
Hussein and his intelligence apparatus, when in 1973 they were able to recruit the Syrian
Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Major General Abdul Razzaq Al-Dardari, as well as a
senior officer, of Circassian descent, in the Air Forces. Thanks to these two agents, the
Jordanian king was able – some months before « Israel’s Egyptian Angel» Ashraf Marwan,
head of President Sadat’s desk for information, informed Israel of the Syrian-Egyptian
preparations for what would later be known as the «Yom Kippur War», according to the
personal archive and papers of Markus Wolf, which he put at my disposal to write his «Arabic
memoirs».

The «final report» that the head of the NSB submitted to his boss Al-Assad on July 27,
2008, indicated that «Based on the 21 April 2008 approval of the Comrade Secretary-General
of the party [Al-Baath], President of the Republic, Brigadier Suleiman and his internal and
external communications, as well as the computers he uses, had been subjected to surveillance
and examination throughout the last three months(...).As well, both Comrade head of the NSB
[Hisham al-Ikhtiyar] and Comrade Major General Assef Shawkat, the head of the Military
Intelligence Department, had subjected Brigadier Suleiman to interrogation three times, during
which he has denied that he collaborated with the Israelis, but he didn’t deny the possibility
that some of the people he had met in Russia, France and Jordan were Israeli agents without
being aware of that». However, the report, revealing that more than $ 100 million in cash was
found in his house’s basement ($ 50 million, € 20 million and £ 5 million), reached decisive
conclusions that Brigadier Suleiman was not only involved in the assassination of Mughniyeh,
but also in «selling other dangerous secrets related to sensitive national security issues», in
particular the secrets of «the alleged nuclear reactor» at the Al-Kibar military site near the city
of Deir Ezzor to the Israelis, whether directly or indirectly, in early 2007, as well as the secrets
of the Russian anti-aircraft «Pantsir S-1» missile deal, to the French during his visit to Paris in
the first half of July 2007. In this context, the report indicated that «the original source of what
the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published on August 13, 2007 about the deal, in which
 15

it depended on an Israeli military source, was in fact Suleiman himself». In addition, the report
revealed that:

«the personal laptops used by Brigadier Suleiman contained dozens of recent photos and
videotapes of several sites belonging to the Scientific Research Centre, including the
Halabiyya-Zlabiyya site [Al Kibar], which was destroyed by the Israeli enemy in September of
last year, as well as recent photos and videotapes showing martyr Imad Mughniyeh delivering a
lecture to a number of Hezbollah fighters in a wilderness. These photos are the ones used by
the killers to identify him (...). In addition to this, lots of Russian-language arms contracts,
including one related to the contract of buying anti-craft Pantsir missiles, were found (....).
These are all considered state secrets that he does not have the right to keep outside his official
workplaces. Because of the photos and videotapes of the Halabiyya-Zlabiyya site, the scope of
the investigation was expanded to include Dr. Ibrahim Othman, director of the Syrian Atomic
Energy Commission (SAEC), and all those who accompanied him to the meetings of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna during the last 3 years. The
examinations of their laptops have proved they did not contain any information or sensitive
documents prohibited from being stored, and none of them has been subjected to piracy or
negligence in security procedures. However, Dr. Othman and other members of the Syrian
delegations to Vienna reported to investigators that Brigadier Suleiman was absent from them
twice on the pretext of going to the market to buy gifts for his wife and children (...).These
clues and circumstantial evidences all confirm that Brigadier Muhammad Kamel Suleiman's
involvement in a number of hostile security penetrations to Syria’s national security, in
particular the assassination of resistant Imad Mughniyeh and the Israeli aggression on one of
our military sites in Deir Ezzor on the morning of last September 6».

By the way, not only these official secret details are what refutes Israel’s absurd
Hollywoodian narrative similar to Grendizer's adventures, which Ronen Bergman provided in
his aforementioned book (Chapter 34, pp. 588-590), but even the stupidity and folly of his
account per se, which shows that he himself is ignorant of what he wrote about. For example,
he claims that the alleged Syrian reactor «is a few miles from the banks of the Euphrates»,
when in reality it is only less than 700 meters away from the river! Even more stupid than that
is his claim that the Mossad pirated Dr. Ibrahim Othman’s own bag in a Vienna hotel and
copied its content of photos related to the reactor when he was attending an IAEA meeting «in
January 2007».In fact, neither Dr. Ibrahim Othman nor any other delegation, even from the
Honolulu or al-Wakwak islands, attended a meeting of the IAEA that month. It’s simply
because the agency did not hold or even schedule any meeting in January 2007!

In any case, the report of the head of the NSB concluded to accuse Brigadier Suleiman of
«exploiting his sensitive job position in order to sell highly sensitive information related to
national security to foreign parties, possibly including the Israeli enemy, which amounts to the
national treason». Therefore, the report called on «the competent authority [commander-in-
chief of the army] to refer brigadier Muhammad Kamel Suleiman to a military court and
impose the most severe penalties for him in accordance with the Military Penal Code,
especially articles 155, 156 and 158». It is worth noting that these articles, which relate to
 16

crimes of national treason, espionage and handing over military information to the enemy,
stipulate the death penalty for any soldier who commits any of them.

Hezbollah executed Suleiman as a «scapegoat» for the Assad regime

Of course, Brigadier Suleiman was not referred to a military court, which was practically
impossible, given the scandals that would ensue from it for the regime. But in Syria there is a
military «judicial system» called «field courts» whose sessions are secret and none of them
lasts more than a few minutes. These courts have tried and executed thousands of political and
criminal prisoners during the past five decades, whether in the desert of Palmyra military
prison or in the arresting centres belonging to SMID and the Air Forces Intelligence
Department. It is clear that Suleiman was also not referred to such a court; otherwise he would
not be killed in his chalet four days after these accusations were brought against him.
According to a letter sent by Major General Amin Sharabah after his retirement in the summer
of 2008 to his French diplomat friend, the leadership of the Syrian regime «also has discussed
the possibility of referring Brigadier General Suleiman to a field court. But the proposal was
soon thrown away as well, given the inability to conceal the matter for a long time, whether its
decision would be life imprisonment or death penalty». It is clear that the only reason why the
regime, especially its head, prompted to exclude the trial of Suleiman, whether before a
military regular or field court, was nothing but fear of a resounding scandal, taking into account
that Suleiman would probably have a sudden and unexpected courage that pushes him to resort
to the «Samson's option», since he knew more than anyone else that he had not acted on his
own, at least in relation to the deal with the Americans «Mughniyeh and Iraq Jihadists in
exchange for al-Hariri». Therefore, the opinion has settled on «getting rid of him with a
mysterious assassination that leaves perpetrator unspecified, and assigning Major General
Assef Shawkat, al-Assad’s brother-in-law and head of SMID at the time, to arrange the matter
during just a few days», said Major General Sharabah’s message.

Shawkat, who had met the assistant of Hezbollah’s leader for security communications
affairs, Wafiq Safa, during the investigations into the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, and
heard from him several testimonies regarding the role of Brigadier Suleiman, immediately
decided to grant the «tender» of getting rid of Suleiman to Hezbollah itself. But he ran into a
«legal formality» related to «the Syrian Arab army’s honour and dignity» that is, the execution
of the death sentence against a Syrian soldier must be done only by Syrian soldiers. That is
why a «compromise» was reached, according to which the shooter «should be a Syrian soldier,
but as a member of a commando team sent and run by Hezbollah by sea, so that it would leave
an impression that who assassinated Suleiman were the Israelis».

According to an affidavit by this shooter (x), who was a staff sergeant belonging to the same
village of Major General Shawkat , al-Madhalah, in the south countryside of the coastal city of
Tartous, and whom I have managed to reach after years’ quest and after Shawkat himself was
killed in the explosion of the NSB headquarter on 18 July 2012, the execution team consisted
of about ten men, including the logistic support group and the captain of the boat that
transported them from a point south of Tartous.
 17

«They all spoke Lebanese dialects, and I was the only Syrian among them (...).At
the evening of that day, which I will never forget in my life, Major General Assef
Shawkat summoned me and told me that I would carry out a death sentence
against a dangerous spy to Israel in his private chalet in the Golden Sands Resort
[about 12 km north of Tartus port], but he did not mention his name to me. All
what he told me was that my only role will be to shoot him from a Makarov pistol
fitted with a silencer, and that I have to follow the directions of a person called
Abu Ali, who seemed to be the commander of the operation, while the team's
other members will carry out all the other logistical duties. He also stressed that I
must keep the secret of the operation concealed forever, otherwise I will meet the
same fate», said the executioner». When we got to a place near the chalet, Abu Ali
called someone via a Walkie-talkie and told him one word that seemed as if a
signal or password, and immediately the electricity went out and darkness
prevailed in the area. Within seconds, three others and I were on the terrace of the
chalet after we put on our masks. I no longer remember how many people were
sitting on the terrace. Maybe they were four or five, women and men. All I
remember is that Abu Ali, using a green laser flashlight, pointed at one of those
sitting around a table, and the first shot was fired from my pistol at his head from
zero distance, and he immediately fell off his chair. Then Abu Ali, and perhaps
someone else also shared that, fired three or four more shots at him and we
immediately withdrew towards the boat. The operation took less than three or four
minutes since the moment we got off the boat (...). It was the first time that I
killed a person, and I did not know who he was until the next day when I heard
from Arab satellite channels that President al-Assad’s security advisor Brigadier
Muhammad Suleiman was killed by an Israeli marine commando team in his own
private chalet in Tartous (...) I had no doubt that I had killed a spy, and my boss
[Shawkat] was implementing President Al-Assad’s orders, and he would not have
assigned me to kill [Suleiman]had he not been an Israeli spy», added the
executioner.

Four years later, on July 18, 2012, Colonel Maher al-Assad, brother of the regime’s head,
would blow up the National Security Bureau’s main meeting room and kill the members of
what was so-called «the Crisis Cell»: al-Assad’s brother-in-law Major General Assef Shawkat,
Defence Minister Colonel General Dawood Rajiha, Colonel General Hassan Turkmani, vice-
President’s assistant, and Major General al-Ikhtiyar himself, the chief of the NSB, Who died a
few days later of his wounds, while al-Ikhtiyar’s deputy for Counter Terrorism Affairs, Major
General Amin Sharabah himself, who was called up to reserve service at the outbreak of the
popular uprising in the spring of 2011, miraculously survived, given his presence in an adjacent
room and his injury was limited to minor wounds in one of his arms. According to special
documents, Maher al-Assad, in coordination with the Director of the General Intelligence
Department, Major General Ali Mamlouk, who will succeed al-Ikhtiyar in his position a few
days after the massacre, have lanted explosives of a specific type in their meeting table through
his proxy Hassan Hamwi, one of al-Ikhtyar's escorts, and whose name I unveil for the first
time! The unspoken reason is that some of the victims, in addition to then Vice President
 18

Farouk al-Shara’, who had been under house arrest since the end of 2011 (and is still until
now), had drawn up a plan, in coordination with Colonel General Aleksandr V.Shlyakhturov,
head of Russian military intelligence (GRU), to overthrow the Assad family mafia through a
«white coup» and establish a temporary transitional authority headed by al-Shara’ to make
Syria avoid a devastating civil war, but Putin «sold» the «conspirators» to Assad and his
brother Maher, according to official documents, which I have been able to collect so far on this
issue, including a secret message sent by al-Shara’ to one of his Russian official friends
adverse to the Kremlin's Syrian policy. But this is another story.

***
When I have finished browsing the documents and testimonies related to this article, I
remembered none other than Noam Chomsky. One day in 2004, I called Chomsky to help with
a world academic campaign that I was coordinating to release a Syrian academic economist,
my professor in the early 1980s Aref Dalilah, whose arrest in a solitary cell was still going on
since Sept 2001 because of a lecture on corruption. In the course of the conversation, Chomsky
said in his own captivating sarcastic language: No political scientist can understand how
politics is made in such as countries. Only a criminal police officer can do that, because we are
facing organized crime syndicates, not states or governments. Maybe he missed adding: A
special Syrian phratry of the Al Capone dynasty!

London: 15.09.2020

--------------------------

(*)- Nizar Nayouf is a Syrian- British historian, investigative journalist and former political prisoner for
10 years in the Syrian regime's cells .For his investigations related to crimes of human rights violations
in Syria, he has been awarded more than twelve world prizes, including those of UNESCO, WAN
Golden Pen, RSF and HRW. He cooperated with the UNIIIC and the office of its successor STL’s
Prosecutor during the period 2006 – 2010.

‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Below is an appendix containing

some of the investigation’s documents
 19

E-mail dated June 13, 2007 from an investigator at the UNIIIC with regard to the
reason of the resignation of Judge Brammertz
 20

E-mail from Brigadier Amin Charabeh to his French diplomat friend on 21 June
2007
 21

The National Security Bureau’s circular on June 21, 2007 regarding the
implementation of the «secret deal» with Washington to stop the flow of terrorists
into Iraq and allow the US occupation forces to pursue them inside Syrian
territory
 22

The initial report submitted by the head of the National Security Bureau, Hisham
Al-Ikhtiar, to Bashar Al-Assad regarding the involvement of Brigadier
Muhammad Suleiman in the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh (3 pages)
23
24